The course provides an introduction to bioinformatics and experience with selected bioinformatics tools and databases currently utilized in the life sciences. The first half of the course introduces fundamental concepts of bioinformatics with topics on biological databases, sequence alignment, BLAST, and phylogenetics; the second half of the course introduces omics technology with topics on next generation sequencing, genome assembly and annotation, transcriptomics (microarray and RNAseq) and metabolomics.

The main purpose of this course is to introduce statistical concepts and current practices for analyzing common data sets generated from different omics experiments. After taking the course, students will:

• Have basic skills to perform statistical analysis and visualization using R aand Bioconductor;
• Understand the biological questions and statistical issues in common omics data analysis
• Be able to interpret the output from these methods;
• Be able to identify appropriate statistical methods for a given experimental design